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Moore’s Law marches on

The news is out pretty much everywhere on Intel's announcement that it's getting ready to kick its 0.09u process into high gear. This new process will allow Intel to pack more transistors onto each die and to lower the power consumption of its chips. Actual products based on this new process are still a little ways off, though:

Intel expects to have three 300 mm wafer fabs using the 90 nm process by 2003. One of the first commercial chips to be made on Intel's process will be the processor codenamed Prescott, which is based on the Intel? NetBurst? micro-architecture and will be introduced in second half of 2003.

I want to take a second to complain about something that I'm seeing more and more of in the press, and that's the misquoting of Moore's Law. Contrary to what's usually stated, Moore's Law does not say that processor performance will double every 18 months or so. And in fact this "Law" isn't really a "law" at all; it's an observation. In 1965 Moore observed that transistor densities tend to double every 12 months or so, a period that has since stretched out to 18 months or so. So all that Moore said was that transistors get smaller and the number of them that you can fit on a given amount of die space doubles roughly every year. This observation got picked up in the press, dubbed a "law," and then was transformed into a vague statement about "computing power" or "performance." I can actually understand calling it a "law;" that's forgivable. But I'm going to pull my hair out if I read another article where some reporter talks about the doubling of "computing power." Ok, I won't actually pull my hair out, because I recently shaved my head, so pulling my hair out would involve tweezers and would take a long time; this would significantly reduce the act's dramatic and cathartic effects. But I'll lash out in some other way, though. Consider yourselves warned.